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Facebook has been successful for me, and from what I have read many other authors enjoy the benefits of advertising there, too. It’s got at least two things going for it, in my opinion. First, it can be relatively cheap. You can set up a daily budget of $5 or $10, and get clicks to your books for a few cents each. Second, Facebook provides a wealth of options when setting up ads, offering to send them to users in very detailed demographics then showing the results from those demographics.

Besides running ads, Facebook also offers options to boost specific posts, making sure more people read it and achieve different objectives such as clicking on your book’s page or your webpage, gaining more “likes” for your Facebook page, etc. Here’s the list of ad campaign objectives available:

Boost your posts

Promote your Page

Send people to your website

Increase conversions on your website

Get installs of your app

Increase engagement in your app

Reach people near your business

Raise attendance at your event

Get people to claim your offer

Get video views

Collect leads for your business

All told, ads on Facebook are well worth looking into. There are several tutorials online that go into much better details about how to be effective with Facebook ads, and quite a few blog posts like this one that are worth your time.

One of the most well known set of tutorials is by Mark Dawson. At the very least, check out his free offerings.

Running an ad campaign on Twitter provides some interesting benefits. If you’ve ever tweeted something out and wondered how successful it was, once you become a Twitter advertiser you’ll get tools that let you see performance stats on all your tweets. That alone is worth the price of admission, in my opinion. Once logged into Twitter, under your Profiles and Settings, click Twitter Ads to get started.

Twitter provides some good info on what people do with your tweets. Under the Analytics page, you can see your most popular tweets, find the number of impressions they made (number of times they showed up for other people), the number of engagements, and the engagement rate percentage. Obviously, those tweets with a higher engagement rate are more successful than others.

Engagements include detail expansions, likes, when a user clicks on your profile from the tweet, retweets other users give you, clicks on links in the tweet, number of people who decided to follow you after reading the tweet, hashtag clicks, and engagement with media linked in the tweet.

Under Promotions, Twitter lets you pay to keep a tweet active. For instance, it can show up in your followers’ tweet streams or stay near the top of a hashtag list. Twitter will offer goals for your tweets, such as link clicks, or additional followers. These vary by price. The more you pay, the longer the tweet stays active, and the greater number of results. Ten dollars is a reasonable sum to play around with to get a feel for what you’re doing.

Twitter ads can easily get expensive, but they do seem to be one way to spread the word about a book. Again, book sales seem to be a numbers game. If a hundred people look at your book’s page online, maybe a few will buy it. Paying too much for people to look at the page will quickly outstrip the royalties received from sales.

You sell books on Amazon. It makes sense to advertise on Amazon as well. Amazon Marketing Services lets you create ads that run on Amazon pages. While people are looking for books similar to yours, an ad will display on the page which hopefully entices them to click over to your book.

For an ad campaign I created for Redwood: Servant of the State, I chose to run the ad based on interests. My targeted interests were Teen and Young Adult, and Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I budgeted $125, and limited the time for a month total, running from about mid-May to mid-June. Here’s the stats for the run:

Over 45,000 impressions looks impressive, but out of all those page views you’ll note only 39 people clicked on the ad, and of those only one person bought a book which was selling for $1.35 at the time. While the run didn’t go over the budget by a long shot, ultimately it did cost $23.50 to sell the one book. Here’s what the ad looked like:

While it was fun to have an ad for my book running alongside some other great books on Amazon, the return on investment proved weak. Things that could possibly improve the return might be a better ad. The basic ad only allows two lines of copy above an image of the cover. Perhaps different verbiage would lead to more clicks, and thus more sales.

As an indie author, I have the dilemma shared by others as to how to get the word out about my books. Naturally, I feel I’ve produced good works of fiction, but since I’m starting a “brand” or “business” from scratch featuring my name on these books, I have no ready or apparent avenues with which to support getting the word out.

I know I’m not alone. In my circle of friends, people have dutifully downloaded my books and offered encouragement, support, and advice. A friend of a friend self published a few years ago, and his book has languished online. Our mutual friend put us in contact with one another. His questions: How do you get sales? How do you advertise your books? How do you get the word out about what you’ve written?

In thinking about these questions, I thought it might be useful to record my advertising efforts on this site, for better or worse. Perhaps this might help other new indies facing similar questions about spreading the word regarding their books.

I certainly haven’t found the magic bullet yet, but perhaps my experiences can lead authors toward productive advertising avenues, and maybe help them avoid ones that are not so useful.